Making Fun: 'We're not going to beat Zynga by following in their shadow'

The News Corp.-owned social game developer Making Fun didn't get into social games to be a small fry. The game maker behind recent releases like Hidden Haunts and Noah's Ark aims to beat out the big kahuna: Zynga. However, the 20-person game division of Rupert Murdoch's media empire admits that it has to buck the trend in order to do well as a new player in the space.

"News Corp didn't get into gaming to be small," Making Fun CEO John Welch told IndustryGamers. "They didn't want us to go and do a bunch of me-too stuff. We're not going to beat Zynga by following in their shadow and nipping at their heels. We're not going to get to where Zynga is by doing what they did," Welch later continued. "If you look at Hidden Haunts, we're not going to be the biggest hidden object game, but we'll be the best. We'll be more successful than all of the other ones."

However, Hidden Haunts is now surrounded by not one, but two hidden-object Facebook games by Playdom, one from Zynga, another by Game Insight and who knows how many more. But moving forward, we're likely to see far different releases from Making Fun, judging by Welch and CTO Lee Crawford's sentiments.

"To compete as an emerging publisher you have to go to where the market's going to be when the title comes out. You can't follow, you can't clone. That's not a way to success," Crawford said to IndustryGamers. "The gorilla can ape all he wants, that works fine, for the smaller guys it's hard." (If that's the case, then Making Fun should probably avoid the casino game genre altogether.)

Are you a fan of Hidden Haunts or Noah's Ark on Facebook? Based on those games, does Making Fun have what it takes to beat Zynga at its own game? Sound off in the comments. Add Comment.